The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3 Read online

  Edited by Allan Kaster

  http://www.audiotexttapes.net

  Copyright

  © 2019 by AudioText and Allan Kaster.

  All rights reserved.

  These short stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ right is appreciated.

  Cover art by Maurizio Manzieri

  Also Edited by Allan Kaster

  The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction, # 1-10

  The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories, # 1-3

  The Year’s Top Short SF Novels, # 1-8

  The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories

  mini-Masterpieces of Science Fiction

  Great Science Fiction Stories

  Steampunk Specs

  Starship Vectors

  We, Robots

  Aliens Rule

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Umbernight” copyright © 2018 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First published in Clarkesworld, February 2018. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Kindred” copyright © 2018 by Peter Watts. First published in Infinity’s End (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Woman Who Destroyed Us” copyright © 2018 by S.L. Huang. First published in Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Technology Review), edited by Wade Roush. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Entropy War” copyright © 2018 by Yoon Ha Lee. First published in 2001: An Odyssey in Words (NewCon Press), edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Intervention” copyright © 2018 by Kelly Robson. First published in Infinity’s End (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Cosmic Spring” copyright © 2018 by Ken Liu. First published in Lightspeed Magazine, March 2018. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Spires” copyright © 2018 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2018. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Providence” copyright © 2018 by Alastair Reynolds. First published in 2001: An Odyssey in Words (NewCon Press), edited by Ian Whates and Tom Hunter. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Nothing Ever Happens on Oberon” copyright © 2018 by Paul McAuley. First published in Infinity’s End (Solaris), edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “3-adica” copyright © 2018 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September/October 2018. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Icefall” copyright © 2018 by Stephanie Gunn. First published as Icefall (Twelfth Planet Press), edited by Alisa Krasnostein, Fiona Fraser, and Tsana Dolichva. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Umbernight

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  THERE IS A note from my great-grandmother in the book on my worktable, they tell me. I haven’t opened it. Up to now I have been too angry at her whole generation, those brave colonists who settled on Dust and left us here to pay the price. But lately, I have begun to feel a little disloyal—not to her, but to my companions on the journey that brought me the book, and gave me the choice whether to read it or not. What, exactly, am I rejecting here—the past or the future?

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  It was autumn—a long, slow season on Dust. It wasn’t my first autumn, but I’d been too young to appreciate it the first time. I was coming back from a long ramble to the north, with the Make Do Mountains on my right and the great horizon of the Endless Plain to my left. I could not live without the horizon. It puts everything in perspective. It is my soul’s home.

  Sorry, I’m not trying to be offensive.

  As I said, it was autumn. All of life was seeding, and the air was scented with lost chances and never agains. In our region of Dust, most of the land vegetation is of the dry, bristly sort, with the largest trees barely taller than I am, huddling in the shade of cliffs. But the plants were putting on their party best before Umbernight: big, white blooms on the bad-dog bushes and patches of bitterberries painting the arroyos orange. I knew I was coming home when a black fly bit me. Some of the organisms we brought have managed to survive: insects, weeds, lichen. They spread a little every time I’m gone. It’s not a big victory, but it’s something.

  The dogs started barking when I came into the yard in front of Feynman Habitat with my faithful buggy tagging along behind me. The dogs never remember me at first, and always take fright at sight of Bucky. A door opened and Namja looked out. “Michiko’s back!” she shouted, and pretty soon there was a mob of people pouring out of the fortified cave entrance. It seemed as if half of them were shorter than my knees. They stared at me as if I were an apparition, and no wonder: my skin was burned dark from the UV except around my eyes where I wear goggles, and my hair and eyebrows had turned white. I must have looked like Grandmother Winter.

  “Quite a crop of children you raised while I was gone,” I said to Namja. I couldn’t match the toddlers to the babies I had left.

  “Yes,” she said. “Times are changing.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I would find out.

  Everyone wanted to help me unpack the buggy, so I supervised. I let them take most of the sample cases to the labs, but I wouldn’t let anyone touch the topographical information. That would be my winter project. I was looking forward to a good hibernate, snug in a warm cave, while I worked on my map of Dust.

  The cargo doors rumbled open and I ordered Bucky to park inside, next to his smaller siblings, the utility vehicles. The children loved seeing him obey, as they always do; Bucky has an alternate career as playground equipment when he’s not with me. I hefted my pack and followed the crowd inside.

  There is always a festive atmosphere when I first get back. Everyone crowds around telling me news and asking where I went and what I saw. This time they presented me with the latest project of the food committee: an authentic glass of beer. I think it’s an acquired taste, but I acted impressed.

  We had a big, celebratory dinner in the refectory. As a treat, they grilled fillets of chickens and fish, now plentiful enough to eat. The youngsters like it, but I’ve never been able to get used to meat. Afterward, when the parents had taken the children away, a group of adults gathered around my table to talk. By then, I had noticed a change: my own generation had become the old-timers, and the young adults were taking an interest in what was going on. Members of the governing committee were conspicuously absent.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Haakon said to me in a low tone.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Everyone exchanged a look. It was Namja who finally explained. “The third cargo capsule from the homeworld is going to land at Newton’s Eye in about six hundred fifty hours.”

  “But . . . ” I stopped when I saw they didn’t need me to tell them the problem. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Umbernight was just around the corner. Much as we needed that cargo, getting to it would
be a gamble with death.

  I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”

  After that, I had nightmares in which I looked up at the sky and there was the face of a corpse hanging there, covered with a shroud. I would watch in terror as the veil would slowly draw aside, revealing rotted flesh and putrid gray jelly eyes, glowing with a deadly unlight that killed everything it touched.

  I didn’t know anything then about planetary nebulae or stars that emit in the UV and X-ray spectrum. I didn’t know we lived in a double-star system, circling a perfectly normal G-class star with a very strange, remote companion. I had learned all that by the time I was an adolescent and Umber finally rose in our sky. I never disputed why I had to spend my youth cooped up in the cave habitat trying to make things run. They told me then, “You’ll be all grown up with kids of your own before Umber comes again.” Not true. All grown up, that part was right. No kids.

  A dog was nudging my knee under the table, and I kneaded her velvet ears. I was glad the pro-dog faction had won the Great Dog Debate, when the colony had split on whether to reconstitute dogs from frozen embryos. You feel much more human with dogs around. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  As if in answer, the tall, stooped figure of Anselm Thune came into the refectory and headed toward our table. We all fell silent. “The Committee wants to see you, Mick,” he said.

  There are committees for every conceivable thing in Feynman, but when someone says “the Committee,” capital C, it means the governing committee. It’s elected, but the same people have dominated it for years, because no one wants to put up with the drama that would result from voting them out. Just the mention of it put me in a bad mood.

  I followed Anselm into the meeting room where the five Committee members were sitting around a table. The only spare seat was opposite Chairman Colby, so I took it. He has the pale skin of a lifelong cave dweller, and thin white hair fringing his bald head.

  “Did you find anything useful?” he asked as soon as I sat down. He’s always thought my roving is a waste of time because none of my samples have produced anything useful to the colony. All I ever brought back was more evidence of how unsuited this planet is for human habitation.

  I shrugged. “We’ll have to see what the lab says about my biosamples. I found a real pretty geothermal region.”

  He grimaced at the word “pretty,” which was why I’d used it. He was an orthodox rationalist, and considered aesthetics to be a gateway drug to superstition. “You’ll fit in well with these gullible young animists we’re raising,” he said. “You and your fairy tales.”

  I was too tired to argue. “You wanted something?” I said.

  Anselm said, “Do you know how to get to Newton’s Eye?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “On foot, about two hundred hours. Allow a little more for the buggy, say two hundred twenty.”

  I could see them calculating: there and back, four hundred forty hours, plus some time to unload the cargo capsule and pack, say four hundred fifty. Was there enough time?

  I knew myself how long the nights were getting. Dust is sharply tilted, and at our latitude, its slow days vary from ten hours of dark and ninety hours of light in the summer to the opposite in winter. We were past the equinox; the nights were over sixty hours long, what we call N60. Umber already rose about midnight; you could get a sunburn before dawn. But most of its radiation didn’t reach us yet because of the cloud of dust, gas, and ionized particles surrounding it. At least, that’s our theory about what is concealing the star.

  “I don’t suppose the astronomers have any predictions when the shroud will part?” I said.

  That set Colby off. “Shroud, my ass. That’s a backsliding anti-rationalist term. Pretty soon you’re going to have people talking about gods and visions, summoning spirits, and rejecting science.”

  “It’s just a metaphor, Colby,” I said.

  “I’m trying to prevent us from regressing into savagery! Half of these youngsters are already wearing amulets and praying to idols.”

  Once again, Anselm intervened. “There is inherent unpredictability about the star’s planetary nebula,” he said. “The first time, the gap appeared at N64.” That is, when night was sixty-four hours long. “The second time it didn’t come till N70.”

  “We’re close to N64 now,” I said.

  “Thank you for telling us,” Colby said with bitter sarcasm.

  I shrugged and got up to leave. Before I reached the door Anselm said, “You’d better start getting your vehicle in order. If we do this, you’ll be setting out in about four hundred hours.”

  “Just me?” I said incredulously.

  “You and whoever we decide to send.”

  “The suicide team?”

  “You’ve always been a bad influence on morale,” Colby said.

  “I’m just calculating odds like a good rationalist,” I replied. Since I really didn’t want to hear his answer to that, I left. All I wanted then was a hot bath and about twenty hours of sleep.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  That was my first mistake. I should have put my foot down right then. They probably wouldn’t have tried it without me.

  But the habitat was alive with enthusiasm for fetching the cargo. Already, more people had volunteered than we could send. The main reason was eagerness to find out what our ancestors had sent us. You could barely walk down the hall without someone stopping you to speculate about it. Some wanted seeds and frozen embryos, electronic components, or medical devices. Others wanted rare minerals, smelting equipment, better water filtration. Or something utterly unexpected, some miracle technology to ease our starved existence.

  It was the third and last cargo capsule our ancestors had sent by solar sail when they themselves had set out for Dust in a faster ship. Without the first two capsules, the colony would have been wiped out during the first winter, when Umber revealed itself. As it was, only two thirds of them perished. The survivors moved to the cave habitat and set about rebuilding a semblance of civilization. We weathered the second winter better here at Feynman. Now that the third winter was upon us, people were hoping for some actual comfort, some margin between us and annihilation.

  But the capsule was preprogrammed to drop at the original landing site, long since abandoned. It might have been possible to reprogram it, but no one wanted to try calculating a different landing trajectory and sending it by our glitch-prone communication system. The other option, the wise and cautious one, was to let the capsule land and just leave it sitting at Newton’s Eye until spring. But we are the descendants of people who set out for a new planet without thoroughly checking it out. Wisdom? Caution? Not in our DNA.

  All right, that’s a little harsh. They said they underestimated the danger from Umber because it was hidden behind our sun as well as its shroud when they were making observations from the home planet. And they did pay for their mistake.

  I spent the next ten hours unpacking, playing with the dogs, and hanging out in the kitchen. I didn’t see much evidence of pagan drumming in the halls, so I asked Namja what bee had crawled up Colby’s ass. Her eyes rolled eloquently in response. “Come here,” she said.

  She led me into the warren of bedrooms where married couples slept and pulled out a bin from under her bed—the only space any of us has for storing private belongings. She dug under a concealing pile of clothes and pulled out a broken tile with a colorful design on the back side—a landscape, I realized as I studied it. A painting of Dust.

  “My granddaughter Marigold did it,” Namja said in a whisper.

  What the younger generation had discovered was not superstition, but art.

  For two generations, all our effort, all our creativity, ha
d gone into improving the odds of survival. Art took materials, energy, and time we didn’t have to spare. But that, I learned, was not why Colby and the governing committee disapproved of it.

  “They think it’s a betrayal of our guiding principle,” Namja said.

  “Rationalism, you mean?”

  She nodded. Rationalism—that universal ethic for which our parents came here, leaving behind a planet that had splintered into a thousand warring sects and belief systems. They were high-minded people, our settler ancestors. When they couldn’t convince the world they were correct, they decided to leave it and found a new one based on science and reason. And it turned out to be Dust.

  Now, two generations later, Colby and the governing committee were trying to beat back irrationality.

  “They lectured us about wearing jewelry,” Namja said.

  “Why?”

  “It might inflame sexual instincts,” she said ironically.

  “Having a body does that,” I said.

  “Not if you’re Colby, I guess. They also passed a resolution against figurines.”

  “That was their idea of a problem?”

  “They were afraid people would use them as fetishes.”

  It got worse. Music and dance were now deemed to have shamanistic origins. Even reciting poetry aloud could start people on the slippery slope to prayer groups and worship.

  “No wonder everyone wants to go to Newton’s Eye,” I said.

  ☼ ☼ ☼

  We held a meeting to decide what to do. We always have meetings, because the essence of rationality is that it needs to be contested. Also because people don’t want responsibility for making a decision.

  About two hundred people crammed into the refectory—everyone old enough to understand the issue. We no longer had a room big enough for all, a sure sign we were outgrowing our habitat.